PUNTA GORDA, Belize | Following the Confederates’ defeat in the American Civil War, a few hundred immigrated to Belize to establish agricultural colonies with their formerly enslaved workers. Before most arrived, Charles Stevens Dwight, an ex-Confederate Army captain and engineer from Berkeley County, surveyed the land.
Dwight’s birthplace, Somerset Plantation, is submerged under Lake Moultrie in Berkeley County. An 1854 graduate of the College of Charleston, Dwight volunteered to fight in the war. Near the end of it, he was captured and imprisoned at a Union Army fort in Ohio.
After the war, the New Orleans-based Young, Toledo and Co., hired him as its chief engineer of surveys for land in Belize, then-called British Honduras.
British Honduras wanted the ex-Confederates like Dwight to use their expertise in sugar and rice production to stimulate its fledgling agricultural economy. They promoted British Honduras as a haven where Southerners, mostly from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, could buy cheap land and maintain an Old South lifestyle and identity.
Some Southerners also may have considered the opportunity as a way to escape the perceived political and economic ravages of a post-war Reconstruction period that gave formerly enslaved people voting power, said Donald C. Simmons Jr., a South Dakota author of Confederate Settlements in British Honduras.
As Dwight surveyed British Honduras’ mountainous and swampy terrain, the fears of Reconstruction troubled him. In a July 1868 entry in his dairy, Dwight wrote that he hoped his father, Isaac Marion Dwight, “is enjoying life as well as can be expected in the evil times that have come upon our once noble and proud old state.”
A family’s legacy
Few people in Punta Gorda, a small fishing and agricultural community in southern Belize with an emerging tourism sector, know of the ex-Confederate’s history where tombstones in two obscure cemeteries are etched with some of the original settlers’ family names.
The area around Punta Gorda was one of the 11 colonies in British Honduras where Confederate settlers came to make their fortunes growing cash crops. They farmed a variety of tropical fruit and vegetables, but sugarcane stuck, giving rise to a rum industry that produced the popular Rocky Run Rum from the 1940s until the early 1970s.
Resident Kim Young’s family was one of the early settlers whose descendants launched the rum label. She lives in a solid cement-block home on inherited land atop a bluff that overlooks the wide Amatique Bay that also washes ashore in neighboring Guatemala.
An oscillating fan in the corner of her living room circulated warm air as her 9-year-old granddaughter, Samada Leonardo, skipped around the room. Samada represents the next generation to inherit the ex-Confederate legacy, a history her grandmother has yet to share with her. Young said she does not think Samada is old enough to understand a past that includes slavery.
Punta Gorda griot
Punta Gorda resident Luis Martinez joined the conversation about Young’s family ties with the rum business and the ex-Confederates. They are former schoolmates who reminisced about life in Punta Gorda, which the locals call PG. They were students when England provided limited support for the country’s schools before Belize gained full independence from England on Sept. 21, 1981.
The 70-year-old Martinez said his father, Francis Martinez, a schoolteacher, told him about the ex-Confederate history. “I learned of it early on so when I went to school it was like me teaching teachers, if they were unaware of it,” he boasted.
Punta Gorda is in Belize’s Toledo District that was once the ex-Confederates’ Toledo Settlement. Tombstones in two obscure cemeteries are etched with ex-Confederate family names, and Martinez knows how to find them.
At least eight members of Louisiana’s Perret family are buried in a small well-manicured burial yard behind a guest house on the bluff that overlooks the bay.
A much larger cemetery borders a wall of dense foliage behind a sprawling modern cemetery in the Forest Home Village, site of one of the original Confederate settlements. A small Confederate flag is stuck atop Julia Abbey Pearce Mason’s grave. Her father, the Rev. Levi Pearce, immigrated from Mississippi, and he recruited settlers to the colony.
Jose Paau works on a fruit farm adjacent to the cemetery. He maintains the burial space. Paau said “foreigners” recently placed the tiny flags on each of the 16 graves, but ants eat most of them.
Hidden history
The history of ex-Confederates is not widely known or popular among most Belizeans, said the jovial Martinez, who is known locally as Uncle Luis. That history, he maintains, is not popular in PG because the ex-Confederates owned and farmed the “better lands” which left many of the indigenous Mayan and Garifuna people landless.
The ancient Mayan civilization was once spread across today’s southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. The Garifuna are people of West African descent who were marooned on St. Vincent in 1635 when slave ships ran aground. In 1797, the British moved the rebelling Garifuna to Roatan off the Honduras coast. They later migrated into Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras. Martinez is of Garifuna descent.
British Honduras ended slavery on Aug. 1, 1838. Most of the Mayans and Garifuna people, he said, were independent and most of them refused to work for the ex-Confederates.
Without a population of enslaved workers in British Honduras, the British indentured the Chinese and people of Indian descent from the country of India to work on the ex-Confederate’s farms, Giovani Pinelo, a public history officer with the Belize’s National Institute of Culture and History, said during an interview in government offices in Belize City. The indentured workers were not enslaved, however, they toiled under a coercive system of labor, he added.
It is not clear how many formerly enslaved people from the Southern United States were brought to British Honduras, Pinelo said. “A lot of the records were lost, so we would have to do a lot more digging to find out who they were,” he explained.
Reasons for failure
From 1865 to 1870, Belize was one of four Latin American countries that attracted ex-Confederates, Civil War historian Chase M. McCarter wrote in his 2025 doctoral degree dissertation at the University of New Mexico. Tens of thousands of ex-Confederates also escaped to Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela “because their defeat in the U.S. Civil War instigated an emotional and identity crisis,” McCarter wrote.
Thomas S. Waring, a Charlestonian surgeon and planter, was one of them. He briefly immigrated to Venezuela. After two months of coping with impassable roads and struggling to produce a profitable cotton crop, Waring returned to Charleston, according to McCarter’s research.
When Dwight arrived in British Honduras during the 1867 Christmas season, he had high hopes the colonies would succeed. But after a year of battling the tropical climate and seeing his colleagues die from cholera, the limitations and shortcomings of the colony deterred him from “bringing his people here.” He also decided to return to the United States.
Simmons said the Confederates succeeded in introducing agriculture to Belize. But if the goal was to start a new confederacy, that didn’t happen, said Simmons, a Mississippi native. He added: “I don’t think that was never going to happen anyway.”
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